The fashion faithful: Charlotte Stockdale

The über-stylist Charlotte Stockdale is as edgy as they get - and also exceedingly posh. The contradictions don't stop there. Caroline Roux hears how she spends her week flying between fashion capitals and Sundays in church

BY Caroline Roux |
29 December 2013

Uber-stylist Charlotte Stockdale in her London flat Photo: TINA HILLIER

You really wouldn't have Charlotte Stockdale down as the church-going type. For a start, she works as a stylist and image-maker at the very sharpest end of fashion - when we meet she has just taken the reins as fashion director at
Garage
, an experimental fashion magazine owned by Roman Abramovich's girlfriend, Dasha Zhukova. She lives in possibly the coolest flat in London - 4,400sq ft of quixotically appointed space (her husband of five years is the superstar designer Marc Newson: the bathroom is carved out of one enormous piece of marble). Her best friend is Katie Grand, the editor of
Love
magazine and (thanks to her intimate connections with brands such as Prada and Louis Vuitton) fashion's de facto head girl. She wears Alaïa to go to the shops.

Related articles

But here she is, with just-got-out-of-bed hair, wearing navy satin Céline tracksuit bottoms and Chanel trainers blooming all over with black leather roses, saying, "Sundays always started with getting up and going to church. And now I still go if I'm down in the country. There's a really nice sense of community about it and you see everyone from the village." Who'd have thought?

But then Stockdale defies expectations in all sorts of ways. She is a reliably warm and sunny presence in a fashion world that can be uncomfortably uptight. She is as down-to-earth as can be, and yet she is spectacularly posh - her father is Sir Thomas Stockdale, 2nd Baronet of Hoddington (Grand once gave her a T-shirt that read rah rah rah; and her mates call her Stockers).

Her preferred reading material is the unlikely genre of science fiction. "There's a lot more content in the Game of Thrones books than in the TV series," she tells me authoritatively. And, aged 42, she has two children - Imogen, aged six, and Lucienne, two and a half - but can rock a Chanel mini without the slightest hint of mutton dressing up as anything.

It's a cold winter's day when we meet, but all is warm and delightfully fragrant at the 19th-century town house in Marylebone that is the Jo Malone London HQ, where Stockdale has spent the past 18 months as the company's "style editor". In the next room, a team from Korean
Harper's Bazaar
is setting up a shoot, and a steady stream of couriers comes and goes, loaded with the distinctive Jo Malone cream carrier bags tied up with black ribbon. "We're flying in Korea at the moment," says Stockdale, peering quizzically through double doors at events in the adjoining room.

Jo Malone London must feel rather lucky to have her on board. It's not as though she's short of things to do. Apart from the job at
Garage
(she took it on once she had left
i-D
, the style magazine where she was fashion director for two years), she has also been the stylist at Fendi for five years, working on campaigns and catwalk shows with Karl Lagerfeld and Silvia Fendi. "Karl draws and comes up with all these brilliant inspirations and ideas, then I just get to play around with them," she says. She has her own office in Pimlico, and employs two full-time staff, including Katy Lyall, who has been her co-stylist for 12 years. "And we have a constant rotation of interns from colleges and schools including my old school, Heathfield."

Stockdale was 11 when she was packed off to the boarding-school, whose alumnae include Sienna Miller, Tamara Mellon and Amber le Bon. "I loved it!" she says. Upon leaving she tried her hand at modelling. "But she just wasn't interested in losing quite the amount of weight they wanted her to," Katie Grand once told me. Stockdale herself says of her modelling shots, "I just looked round and unhappy about being there." (Depressing proof, if anymore were needed, of just how ridiculously skinny models are expected to be.)

So she started styling. She worked with Grand in the early days of
Dazed & Confused
and then in 1998 she was headhunted by American
Harper's Bazaar,
where she stayed for two years. Paul Smith saw her potential - that fresh, insouciant, slightly punky vibe that the British seem to possess - as did Dolce & Gabbana, for whom she delivered 10 seasons of shows. Amanda Harlech, with whom she has worked at Fendi, describes her as "a sensuous modernist with an obsession for colour and texture and cut".

Stockdale grew up surrounded by good taste and artistic ability, first at Conington, "a beautiful Queen Anne house" in Cambridgeshire, and then at Hoddington, the Stockdale family's 18th-century home. "My French grandmother made beautiful paintings of Vietnam and my father's mother did incredible botanical flower illustrations. His father was a fantastic photographer and cartoonist," she says of her forebears. "I cannot draw at all, but I am very visual. I'm totally Instagram, and not Twitter."

While the houses of her childhood have inspired her collection for Jo Malone London, her own homes in London and Paris couldn't be more different. Stockdale has been with Marc Newson, the Australian designer best known for his exuberant Pop-influenced work and love of the colour orange, since 2006 (the pair had been friends for years before becoming romantically involved). Their London flat has an 82ft-long living space, one wall of which is lined entirely with stones and where Newson's own furniture prevails.

"It's become more lived-in since we first moved in, in 2008," says Stockdale. "I have softened the edges and I finally got my dining-table. I'm not pushy about many things, but I was not going to settle for anything other than one of Marc's Micarta tables. It's a couple of metres long, and it's so heavy it takes 10 people to carry it." The table, made from resin-infused linen polished to a mirror shine, is certainly a collector's item. A desk from the same series sold at auction several years ago for well over $200,000 [£120,000]. Stockdale's other indulgence is the library, reached up a small flight of stairs, where the walls are lined with books, the squashy sofas are upholstered in Colefax & Fowler fabrics and there is a zebra-print rug on the floor. "A little bit of Hoddington in London," she says.

With her husband, Marc Newson, in 2010 (Photo: Rex)

The Paris apartment, which she stays in four times a year while attending the fashion shows, is in a 1950s redbrick villa overlooking the city. In the kitchen even the Aga and the Smeg fridge are lacquered in the same cornflower blue as the bespoke units. "It's only about lighting that Marc and I have very differing opinions," she says of their surprisingly complementary tastes. "He's more interested in what a lamp looks like, even if it gives an awful light, and I just couldn't give a rat's whatever about its design, just the quality of light. I fight for downlighting. And lose."

Newson and Stockdale married at Hoddington in 2008. The bride wore an Azzedine Alaïa dress and veil that took 200 metres of fabric to make. The groom also wore Alaïa - the designer's one and only excursion into bespoke menswear. (Newson and Alaïa have been close friends since Newson arrived in Paris in the 1990s. They are, according to Stockdale, "like family" to each other.) "It was a fairytale affair," says Stockdale of the wedding. And despite a guest list that included the fashion designers Viktor and Rolf and Stefano Pilati, "It wasn't at all fashiony," according to Katie Grand. "That just wouldn't be Charlotte."

While Stockdale regularly jets off to Rome (for Fendi) and Paris, Newson's career takes him around the world. His design portfolio is enormous: furniture for the Italian company Magis; luggage for Samsonite; planes and departure lounges for Qantas; ice buckets for Dom Perignon; lighting for Flos; shoes for Nike. In November he curated the Red Auction with his best friend Sir Jonathan Ive, the Apple design vice president, which involved a joint trip to New York for the couple. The auction, presided over by Bono, raised more than $13 million (£7.9 million) for the Global Fund to fight Aids in Africa and attracted everyone from Chris Martin of Coldplay to Anna Wintour. "We try not to be ships in the night. What would be the point?" Stockdale says of their complicated schedules.

Stockdale with Dasha Zhukova (right), who set up Garage magazine (Photo: Rex)

In fact, the Jo Malone London job so far has taken her no further than a place "near Stansted Airport", where the scents are developed. "I've driven up the A1 a fair few times," she says. Stockdale arrives armed with story-boards ("always images, not words") and from that they begin to create smells to fit the brand, which she describes as "traditional but with a twist. I love the fact that you know what the ingredients are and they're relatively simple. There's no weird kind of nebulous thing that you can't grasp. I like quite honest scents personally, and I think it's a very elegant brand. It is a bit like having a Chanel handbag." She mentions with some satisfaction that there were Jo Malone products at Drynachan, the Earl and Countess of Cawdor's shooting lodge, which she visited last year. Newson, who has an unusually acute sense of smell, is her best sounding-board. "I'd never get anything really dense or heavy past him," she says. "He likes roses."

For the new scented-candle range, she delved into her childhood, and conjured up her favourite smells from the Sundays of her youth. "Once I started thinking about the rooms you might burn candles in, it took me back to that beautiful Georgian house in Cambridgeshire where I grew up," she says. The results, laid out before us on a vast oak table, are delicious and delicate: Lavender & Lovage, reminiscent of the stone-flagged laundry-room in the basement of her family home and the herb garden outside the window; Green Tomato Leaf, inspied by her mother's "tiny greenhouse - there was nothing like opening the greenhouse door on a hot summer's day"; Sweet Almond & Macaroon, which harks back to the tea her grandmother laid "every day at 4.30pm, with scones and cakes and crustless sandwiches and two kinds of tea"; and, of course, Incense & Embers, with its church associations.

"I loved the smell of church, still do," she says with a smile. "Incense brings back a lot of good memories for me."